Learning to Rank when Grades Matter

Graded labels are ubiquitous in real-world learning-to-rank applications, especially in human rated relevance data. Traditional learning-to-rank techniques aim to optimize the ranked order of documents. They typically, however, ignore predicting actual grades. This prevents them from being adopted in applications where grades matter, such as filtering out ``poor'' documents. Achieving both good ranking performance and good grade prediction performance is still an under-explored problem. Existing research either focuses only on ranking performance by not calibrating model outputs, or treats grades as numerical values, assuming labels are on a linear scale and failing to leverage the ordinal grade information. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous study of learning to rank with grades, where both ranking performance and grade prediction performance are important. We provide a formal discussion on how to perform ranking with non-scalar predictions for grades, and propose a multiobjective formulation to jointly optimize both ranking and grade predictions. In experiments, we verify on several public datasets that our methods are able to push the Pareto frontier of the tradeoff between ranking and grade prediction performance, showing the benefit of leveraging ordinal grade information.

On the Factory Floor: ML Engineering for Industrial-Scale Ads Recommendation Models

For industrial-scale advertising systems, prediction of ad click-through rate (CTR) is a central problem. Ad clicks constitute a significant class of user engagements and are often used as the primary signal for the usefulness of ads to users. Additionally, in cost-per-click advertising systems where advertisers are charged per click, click rate expectations feed directly into value estimation. Accordingly, CTR model development is a significant investment for most Internet advertising companies. Engineering for such problems requires many machine learning (ML) techniques suited to online learning that go well beyond traditional accuracy improvements, especially concerning efficiency, reproducibility, calibration, credit attribution. We present a case study of practical techniques deployed in Google's search ads CTR model. This paper provides an industry case study highlighting important areas of current ML research and illustrating how impactful new ML methods are evaluated and made useful in a large-scale industrial setting.

Real World Large Scale Recommendation Systems Reproducibility and Smooth Activations

Real world recommendation systems influence a constantly growing set of domains. With deep networks, that now drive such systems, recommendations have been more relevant to the user's interests and tasks. However, they may not always be reproducible even if produced by the same system for the same user, recommendation sequence, request, or query. This problem received almost no attention in academic publications, but is, in fact, very realistic and critical in real production systems. We consider reproducibility of real large scale deep models, whose predictions determine such recommendations. We demonstrate that the celebrated Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation, used in deep models, can be a major contributor to irreproducibility. We propose the use of smooth activations to improve recommendation reproducibility. We describe a novel family of smooth activations; Smooth ReLU (SmeLU), designed to improve reproducibility with mathematical simplicity, with potentially cheaper implementation. SmeLU is a member of a wider family of smooth activations. While other techniques that improve reproducibility in real systems usually come at accuracy costs, smooth activations not only improve reproducibility, but can even give accuracy gains. We report metrics from real systems in which we were able to productionalize SmeLU with substantial reproducibility gains and better accuracy-reproducibility trade-offs. These include click-through-rate (CTR) prediction systems, content, and application recommendation systems.

Dropout Prediction Variation Estimation Using Neuron Activation Strength

It is well-known that deep neural networks generate different predictions even given the same model configuration and training dataset. It thus becomes more and more important to study prediction variation, the variation of the predictions on a given input example, in neural network models. Dropout has been commonly used in various applications to quantify prediction variations. However, using dropout in practice can be expensive as it requires running dropout inferences many times to estimate prediction variation. We study how to estimate dropout prediction variation in a resource-efficient manner. We demonstrate that we can use neuron activation strengths to estimate dropout prediction variation under different dropout settings and on a variety of tasks using three large datasets, MovieLens, Criteo, and EMNIST. Our approach provides an inference-once alternative to estimate dropout prediction variation as an auxiliary task. Moreover, we demonstrate that using activation features from a subset of the neural network layers can be sufficient to achieve variation estimation performance almost comparable to that of using activation features from all layers, thus reducing resources even further for variation estimation.

Looking Outside the Window: Wide-Context Transformer for the Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Long-range context information is crucial for the semantic segmentation of High-Resolution (HR) Remote Sensing Images (RSIs). The image cropping operations, commonly used for training neural networks, limit the perception of long-range context information in large RSIs. To break this limitation, we propose a Wide-Context Network (WiCoNet) for the semantic segmentation of HR RSIs. In the WiCoNet, apart from a conventional feature extraction network that aggregates the local information, an extra context branch is designed to explicitly model the spatial information in a larger image area. The information between the two branches is communicated through a Context Transformer, which is a novel design derived from the Vision Transformer to model the long-range context correlations. Ablation studies and comparative experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, we present a new Beijing Land-Use (BLU) dataset. This is a large-scale HR satellite dataset provided with high-quality and fine-grained reference labels, which can boost future studies in this field.

MP-ResNet: Multi-path Residual Network for the Semantic segmentation of High-Resolution PolSAR Images

There are limited studies on the semantic segmentation of high-resolution Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) images due to the scarcity of training data and the inference of speckle noises. The Gaofen contest has provided open access of a high-quality PolSAR semantic segmentation dataset. Taking this chance, we propose a Multi-path ResNet (MP-ResNet) architecture for the semantic segmentation of high-resolution PolSAR images. Compared to conventional U-shape encoder-decoder convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, the MP-ResNet learns semantic context with its parallel multi-scale branches, which greatly enlarges its valid receptive fields and improves the embedding of local discriminative features. In addition, MP-ResNet adopts a multi-level feature fusion design in its decoder to make the best use of the features learned from its different branches. Ablation studies show that the MPResNet has significant advantages over its baseline method (FCN with ResNet34). It also surpasses several classic state-of-the-art methods in terms of overall accuracy (OA), mean F1 and fwIoU, whereas its computational costs are not much increased. This CNN architecture can be used as a baseline method for future studies on the semantic segmentation of PolSAR images. The code is available at: https://github.com/ggsDing/SARSeg.

Smooth activations and reproducibility in deep networks

Deep networks are gradually penetrating almost every domain in our lives due to their amazing success. However, with substantive performance accuracy improvements comes the price of \emph{irreproducibility}. Two identical models, trained on the exact same training dataset may exhibit large differences in predictions on individual examples even when average accuracy is similar, especially when trained on highly distributed parallel systems. The popular Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation has been key to recent success of deep networks. We demonstrate, however, that ReLU is also a catalyzer to irreproducibility in deep networks. We show that not only can activations smoother than ReLU provide better accuracy, but they can also provide better accuracy-reproducibility tradeoffs. We propose a new family of activations; Smooth ReLU (\emph{SmeLU}), designed to give such better tradeoffs, while also keeping the mathematical expression simple, and thus training speed fast and implementation cheap. SmeLU is monotonic, mimics ReLU, while providing continuous gradients, yielding better reproducibility. We generalize SmeLU to give even more flexibility and then demonstrate that SmeLU and its generalized form are special cases of a more general methodology of REctified Smooth Continuous Unit (RESCU) activations. Empirical results demonstrate the superior accuracy-reproducibility tradeoffs with smooth activations, SmeLU in particular.

DCN-M: Improved Deep & Cross Network for Feature Cross Learning in Web-scale Learning to Rank Systems

Learning effective feature crosses is the key behind building recommender systems. However, the sparse and large feature space requires exhaustive search to identify effective crosses. Deep & Cross Network (DCN) was proposed to automatically and efficiently learn bounded-degree predictive feature interactions. Unfortunately, in models that serve web-scale traffic with billions of training examples, DCN showed limited expressiveness in its cross network at learning more predictive feature interactions. Despite significant research progress made, many deep learning models in production still rely on traditional feed-forward neural networks to learn feature crosses inefficiently. In light of the pros/cons of DCN and existing feature interaction learning approaches, we propose an improved framework DCN-M to make DCN more practical in large-scale industrial settings. In a comprehensive experimental study with extensive hyper-parameter search and model tuning, we observed that DCN-M approaches outperform all the state-of-the-art algorithms on popular benchmark datasets. The improved DCN-M is more expressive yet remains cost efficient at feature interaction learning, especially when coupled with a mixture of low-rank architecture. DCN-M is simple, can be easily adopted as building blocks, and has delivered significant offline accuracy and online business metrics gains across many web-scale learning to rank systems.

Beyond Point Estimate: Inferring Ensemble Prediction Variation from Neuron Activation Strength in Recommender Systems

Despite deep neural network (DNN)'s impressive prediction performance in various domains, it is well known now that a set of DNN models trained with the same model specification and the same data can produce very different prediction results. Ensemble method is one state-of-the-art benchmark for prediction uncertainty estimation. However, ensembles are expensive to train and serve for web-scale traffic. In this paper, we seek to advance the understanding of prediction variation estimated by the ensemble method. Through empirical experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets MovieLens and Criteo in recommender systems, we observe that prediction variations come from various randomness sources, including training data shuffling, and parameter random initialization. By introducing more randomness into model training, we notice that ensemble's mean predictions tend to be more accurate while the prediction variations tend to be higher. Moreover, we propose to infer prediction variation from neuron activation strength and demonstrate the strong prediction power from activation strength features. Our experiment results show that the average R squared on MovieLens is as high as 0.56 and on Criteo is 0.81. Our method performs especially well when detecting the lowest and highest variation buckets, with 0.92 AUC and 0.89 AUC respectively. Our approach provides a simple way for prediction variation estimation, which opens up new opportunities for future work in many interesting areas (e.g.,model-based reinforcement learning) without relying on serving expensive ensemble models.

Small Towers Make Big Differences

Multi-task learning aims at solving multiple machine learning tasks at the same time. A good solution to a multi-task learning problem should be generalizable in addition to being Pareto optimal. In this paper, we provide some insights on understanding the trade-off between Pareto efficiency and generalization as a result of parameterization in multi-task deep learning models. As a multi-objective optimization problem, enough parameterization is needed for handling task conflicts in a constrained solution space; however, from a multi-task generalization perspective, over-parameterization undermines the benefit of learning a shared representation which helps harder tasks or tasks with limited training examples. A delicate balance between multi-task generalization and multi-objective optimization is therefore needed for finding a better trade-off between efficiency and generalization. To this end, we propose a method of under-parameterized self-auxiliaries for multi-task models to achieve the best of both worlds. It is task-agnostic and works with other multi-task learning algorithms. Empirical results show that small towers of under-parameterized self-auxiliaries can make big differences in improving Pareto efficiency in various multi-task applications.